


Escape Plan

by se_parsons



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-14
Updated: 2020-11-14
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:48:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27553360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/se_parsons/pseuds/se_parsons
Summary: SPOILERS: Very mild spoilers for Everything up to X-Cops.RATING: PG-13CLASSIFICATION: StoryKEYWORDS: Mulder, Scully, Scully-angstSUMMARY:   Mulder and Scully return to their motel after X-Cops.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 1
Kudos: 11





	Escape Plan

I think about it again as Mulder drives us through the early-morning rush hour traffic to our motel in a slightly less seedy part of the city. The film crews are, thankfully, gone and Mulder is oblivious on his post-chase high, tapping his thumbs on the steering wheel as he weaves his way through the heavy traffic though we move only at a snail’s pace.

He reminds me, oddly, of the first week I met him. Happily running off in pursuit of something invisible to anyone but him. Content with is lot - Spooky Mulder - the guy who hunts the paranormal.

It seems almost surreal in light of the events of the past few weeks, the death of his mother, the discovery of the only real evidence proving his sister was alive past the night of her disappearance and Mulder’s absolute willingness to believe in an entirely spiritual explanation for her second vanishing. This, from the man who has always denied the existence of God and angels and spirituality. Why now? Why this time, when I find the spiritual explanation to be entirely inadequate.

Perhaps it’s just another example of how different we are still, despite all we’ve been through together.

Or, perhaps, it’s merely attrition. Perhaps it’s merely Mulder’s way of giving up at last. Of giving up without giving up. Of deceiving himself that he’s reached the end of his quest, that he can be free, while there are no real answers there at all. No real answer but that he doesn’t have to feel guilty any more.

Perhaps it was just time for him to put the guilt aside. He’d punished himself enough, and finding his sister’s diary proving his belief in her existence beyond that night in 1974 was justified, finding the proof that his faith had meant something, allowed him to simply stop punishing himself.

I can’t say. Because despite all we’ve been through together, I still understand him as imperfectly as I did that day in 1992 when I sat beside him on a highway in Oregon as we lost 9 minutes of our lives to an unexplained phenomenon.

There are so many ways I know him. So many little ways in which I know him better than I’ve ever known anyone, maybe better than anyone has ever known anyone. But it’s still not enough. His mind, his goals, his dreams and desires are as hidden to me now as they were that first day. What does he really want? What does he hope will come? I don’t know, because he never tells me anything.

This too-bright California morning he’s animated and as full of zeal as I’ve seen him in a long time, even though we’ve come up empty-handed again, and this time in front of a national television audience. Or we will be on national television, as soon as the tape editors and segment producers get done with the tape that was shot tonight. That is, if they can make sense of what happened.

Mulder has a theory, of course, one in keeping with the facts at hand as they always are, but he could just as easily have said the deaths were caused by gray monkeys flying out the victim’s butts as an invisible monster feeding on each victim’s darkest fear. That was the stuff of a Stephen King novel, not the stuff of professional law enforcement.

But does it make good television?

That’s up to the audience to decide.

I shudder as I think of those hours of videotapes, so zealously gathered by those nameless cameramen. The one who followed me around like a puppy wearing an expression I last saw on the face of poor Pendrell, is it four years ago now? My how time flies when your friends are dead. I both know and imagine what those tapes have captured. What they show about me, about my partner. How they make us look.

But, then, it must be just how we always look to the people who don’t know us. Who don’t know the history. 

I remember the face of my little cameraman, the one whose name I don’t know and will never know. I remember his expression when Mulder flat out dismissed me to the morgue. While he did the “real” investigating. The boy grimly set his jaw and followed me, to capture the collapse and death of the coroner from her psychosomatic Hanta Virus and my grinning lapse of decorum as I smilingly told my AD to fuck off. On national television, yet. Yes, what must we look like.

But, of course, that isn’t the real question.

The real question is, that if pictures, especially video, ARE real life - the question is what must we BE like. Because if video evidence is permissible in trials, what was captured by my boy and the other cameramen last night IS reality. It IS what we are.

Mulder a preening, pompous boor, bullying and ordering me and the LA Co. Sheriffs about like we were medieval lackeys, and me a frigid and bitter shrew more suited for cracking schoolchildren on the knuckles with rulers than conversing with decent people. I have become one of the old, bitter nuns I hated when I followed Melissa to grammar school in my pigtails and plaid jumper, terrorizing the uninitiated just because I can. Because what I am is so much worse- so very cold.

This is what I am. This is what he is. This is what we are together.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

I am realistic enough to know that. I know how to stop it. And I have been thinking about it for more than a year now. 

Nearly a year ago, now, before Mulder’s illness, after Gibson Praise, during the tenure of Diana Fowley, I came up with an escape plan - a very, very simple one. One that would end this once and for all. And I wrote it up and put it in my desk drawer at the Bureau, knowing I would need it someday soon.

Not as soon as I’d anticipated. I had been expecting something more along the lines of “Well, Scully, I think that Diana should come to work with us on the X-Files. She has a lot of experience with the paranormal, you know.” Not the slow, infinitesimal attrition that’s been the truth instead.

I knew especially after that horrible, awful non-event of a New Year’s kiss. A kiss that should have been rich with promise, momentous with consummation, or sweet with affection, but instead, was simply - nothing. The world didn’t end. No, it didn’t. Because it had already ended long before and we were standing in the ashes.

And yet, still, I made no move to escape - despite the attrition, despite the non-eventful kiss, despite all of the nothing. It was as though I was paralyzed. But I really wasn’t. I just wasn’t ready yet. I still had the last dregs of my innocence the last tiny vestige of hope somewhere in my soul. Hope for me. Hope for him. Hope for the both of us.

And then I killed Donnie Pfaster in cold blood with malice aforethought and during thought and afterthought, and Mulder lied in his report and I woke up the next morning to find that all my hope was gone. That he’d seen right down inside me as I’d seen inside myself and he knew. He knew now what I really was, how flawed, how bad, how dirty, and the last of my hope was gone the second I saw the light and warmth go out of his eyes when he looked at me. 

I love Mulder more than I have ever loved another human being, more than I will ever be capable of loving again. I am well aware of that. But love doesn’t change the way things are. It doesn’t change me and it doesn’t change him.

I don’t think he even knows I feel that way about him, though he should. A man as observant as he is about everything else would. No matter how many times I’ve tried to hide from him, I’ve spilled it out more often. With a look, a touch, a smile when I shouldn’t have given it, I’ve opened myself to him and bled so many times that the scar tissue is too thick now for blood.

And his wounds are as deep, I’m sure. I’m sure that’s why he could so easily order me to do the autopsy on his mother with so little care for how it would bother me, how I would dream of it for the rest of my life, dream about cutting into the woman that made him. At least I like to think that’s why he could ask such a thing when he knows I can refuse him nothing.

I look over at my partner, concentrating on making a sharp lane change to inch forward just a second or two faster in the next lane over. He’s in a hurry to get back to the motel. Why can’t he see that, like all the others stuck in this traffic jam, we’re going nowhere? That we haven’t been for the longest time.

There’s no way to go forward anymore. But, like anyone caught in a traffic jam, there’s always a way out. Just open a door and leave the car. Abandon that useless baggage and start out ahead on your own two feet. Pretty soon, you’ll have outdistanced them all. 

Well, I have my plan in place. My plan to escape this awful degeneration that is my life. My plan to erase the ugliness that will be shown the world on the Fox Network some night in the near future.

It’s lying on the bottom of my desk drawer back in D.C. And when we get home, I aim to pull it out and use it.

I won’t give it to Mulder even though I think more and more that he’d be relieved to see it. But on the off chance that he wouldn’t be, I don’t want him to return to feeling guilty. Not as free as he is now. I don’t want to spoil that. I like to think of him, happy in his work, teeth sunk into some new paranormal case, glasses on as he digs through paperwork in his basement office. Happy as he has ever been. Happy as he was before I met him. I like to think of him like that.

And me, I’ll be free, too.

Free of the X-Files, free of this seemingly-unending round of death and misery, free of paranoia and conspiracy, free of malevolent old men who somehow still manage to keep their plotting in the family, and most of all free of Mulder and the myriad ways he makes me feel.

I don’t want to feel anymore. I most certainly don’t want to feel like I feel right now - old, used, humiliated, ridiculous, stupid, frustrated, barren, empty, and most of all, so very, very tired.

I take my sunglasses out of the glove box and put them on as Mulder turns us into the glare of the rising California sun.

I don’t know what I’ll do. Escape plans don’t usually include what comes after. But it will be something. Something useful. Something good. I know myself well enough to know that.

I just hope somehow that it will matter to me. Because right now nothing does.


End file.
